Jury awards $2.2 million to family of man killed by LAPD officer
Los Angeles Times - ‎5 hours ago‎
A jury in a civil case Tuesday awarded $2.2 million to the family of a 26-year-old man who was shot and killedby a Los Angeles police officer - a shooting that Chief Charlie Beck had deemed justified and Dist. Atty. Jackie Lacey declined to prosecute ...

Benghazi explosion: Suicide bomb kills 18 in Libyan city
BBC News
Correspondents say it was the fourth vehicle bombing in the city in a week, although the number of people killed from Tuesday's explosion was far higher than in previous attacks. A witness told Reuters news agency the powerful explosionon Tuesday had ...

Teen killed in triple shooting
Atlanta Journal Constitution -
Police are investigating a shooting that left a teen dead and injured two men Wednesday morning outside a DeKalb County grocery store.

British jets bomb Saddam palace used by Isis in Iraq
The Guardian
British jets bomb Saddam palace used by Isis in Iraq. Ministry of Defence says Tornado fighters dropped RAF's heaviest guided bombs on Mosul complex where Islamic State was training foreign recruits.

Father of Mukilteo shooting survivor: 'My son is alive'
KING5.com
SEATTLE -- The father of the young man who was shot at a party in Mukilteo where three people were killed spoke publicly for the first time since the shooting. Will Kramer, 18, is recovering at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle in serious condition ...

One fatality in Palm Bay officer-involved shooting
Florida Today -
The sheriff's department, aided with the use of a bomb squad robot, entered the home. When SWAT members breached the ... Police engaged the suspect about 10:45 p.m. when they shot and killed him in the ensuing gunfire. Palm Bay police did not release ...

Seventy-one years ago Saturday, a United States B-29 bomber named the "Enola Gay" dropped the atomic bomb "Little Boy" over the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

The bomb fell just over 29,000 feet from the plane and detonated 1,900 feet above Shima Hospital, an active medical center with a history dating back to the 18th Century. Between four and five square miles of buildings were leveled in the blast generated by just 141 pounds of highly enriched uranium. The US Department of Energy (DoE) estimates 70,000 people died in the initial blast, resulting fires, and radiation burst on August 6, 1945, but that the five-year death toll may have exceeded 200,000 people.

President Harry Truman told Japan to surrender or "expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth." Three days later, a second bomb (this time plutonium-based) dropped from an American warplane over the city of Nagasaki. The DoE estimates 40,000 people died in the immediate aftermath, and that number may have reached 140,000 within five years.

These events remain the only cases, so far, of human beings attacking other human beings with nuclear weapons. But the survivors of these attacks are from from the only people to carry the marks of nuclear warfare in their bodies.

Every person alive on the 71st anniversary of those attacks holds in their flesh radioactive remnants of the nuclear era — a period centered in the early decades of Cold War when nuclear nations conducted atmospheric tests of ever-larger bombs.

That's the period that left us images of bright, sky-piercing mushroom clouds like the one at the top of this article, and footage like this of the devastation these weapons could wreak.

Hundreds of bombs detonated in the open air (and several more in the ocean) during the heyday of atmospheric nuclear testing — with thousands more tests conducted underground.

The 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty put a stop to exposed American and Soviet explosions, though France and China continued atmospheric tests until 1974 and 1980, respectively. Many countries pursued underground testing through the early 1990s. Only North Korea has detonated a weapon in the 21st Century.

Nuclear explosions produce radioactive substances that are rare in nature — like carbon-14, a radioactive form of the carbon atom that forms the chemical basis of all life on earth.

Once released into the atmosphere, carbon-14 enters the food chain and gets bound up in the cells of most living things. There's still enough floating around for researchers to detect in the DNA of humans born in 2016. If you're reading this article, it's inside you.